Unlock Powerful Tableau Drill Downs With Set Actions 🔍

If you’re still clicking around dashboards trying to “fake” a drill down — stop! In this video, I’ll walk you step-by-step through how to use Set Actions in Tableau to build a fully interactive bar chart drill down.

👉 Start here to level up faster:

Tableau Starter Kit → https://www.nextleveltableau.com/starterkit

Core Concepts Course → https://www.nextleveltableau.com/tcc

Next-Level Tableau → https://www.nextleveltableau.com/

I’ve helped thousands of Tableau analysts move from frustration to clarity using features like this — and once you master Set Actions, your dashboards will finally work like your users expect them to.

📌 If you’re ready to stop confusing your users and start building cleaner, smarter dashboards… you’re in the right place.

See how it all works below the video.

If you are anything like me, you get super annoyed that the font in the selected value of a dropdown filter does not match the font of the text when you click the dropdown. Here's an example:

Set actions are super useful when you want to see how one thing compares to the rest. In this use case, I show you how you can click on a State and have all other States show as a comparison to the selected State.

I have been keeping a "master" workbook of many of the exercises I use to teach at The Data School, particularly when we get into advanced topics like table calculations, level of detail expressions, set actions, parameter actions, parameters, etc. I started this workbook a few cohorts ago, so surely there are tons more that I have forgotten. Tooltips aren't always formatted, cards are removed, and that's not the point. The calculations are the meat of this workbook.

I've decided to share these with you, the Community, so that you can learn right along with the DSers. As of this writing, there are 61 examples in the workbook. As I add more, I'll re-publish the workbook.

You are welcome to use this in any way you please. However, please cite me as a source if you do; that's only fair. I would recommend you try to rebuild these examples before looking at the solution; you'll learn way more that way. The examples at the start of the workbook tend to be simpler, so start there and progress your way through. These aren't necessarily "perfect" solutions (there isn't a perfect solution), but they solve the puzzle we were seeking to solve.

And the name? It is inspired by the Big Book of Dashboards. I've always loved the name of that book! This workbook should be a good companion to the Tableau Visual Vocabulary I created in July 2018.

Enjoy! Now go learn!

This isn't something I can condone the use of, but I thought it was a fun technique for learning set actions. In this example, I show you how to create a pie chart inside of a pie chart where the inner pie chart will drill down based on the selection of the outer pie chart.

Have you ever needed to compare the rank of items, but only show two of them? For example, you want to show any player compared to Player A. Player A should always be in the view and another play should only be shown when selected.

And, when you display any players, you need to show their rank amongst everyone. This is where set actions come into play.

In this example, I show you how to compare any car to a car that you selected from a parameter. The car you select from the scatterplot appears next to the car selected from the parameter and the overall rank for each car is displayed.

In this week's tip, I take you through how to set up basic drill down view using set actions. In the workbook below, I've included two additional views: sparklines and a region to state map.

Enjoy!

UPDATE (19-Apr)

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Week 16 is here and in collaboration with RJ Andrews, author of Info We Trust, we are making over a word cloud he created based on the frequency of the 270 most popular words in the book.

What works well?

What could be improved?

What I did

In this tip, I show you how to use set actions to create a map that allows the user to click on a region and show the states for the region, but keeping all other areas at the region level.

CONFESSION: I have been avoiding using set actions because I've struggled to wrap my head around getting them to work the way I think they should work.

Fortunately, we're surrounded by brilliant people at The Data School, so today Coach Carl asked Harry Cooney from DS11 (graduating tomorrow) to run a lesson for the team. Harry clearly understand them and walked us through several practical use cases to help us understand the basics. He then assigned each of us the task of recreating one of the vizzes from Lindsey Poulter's amazing resource of Set Action use cases. I was tasked with recreating her dynamic reference lines and colors viz.

I took on this challenge as I would a Workout Wednesday:

1. Understand the requirements
2. Play with the viz to see what it's doing
3. Rebuild the viz
4. Don't look at the method for the original until I'm done

Week 45 continued the post-2018.3 set actions theme. This week, Rody gave us a fairly simple, yet extremely useful challenge. We had to create a simple table that highlighting the rows and columns for the selected cell that you hover over.

The highlighter is very fickle. It seems you have to hover over a very specific spot to get it to work. I was able to make it work by using a boolean calculation, but the highlight set action was going crazy. So I went with Rody's technique of making it a continuous field so that it would actually stick.

This being the first Workout Wednesday since TC18, Ann Jackson decided to spoil us by letting us test out set actions. Set actions allow the user to dynamically update a set based on actions in a dashboard. They're wickedly powerful and a game changer for Tableau.

Here are the basic requirements (full list here):

1. Create a line chart of monthly sales that drills into the months you select
2. Create a treemap of sales by category that has the ability to drill to sub-category and product name upon clicking
3. When selecting months in the line chart, the treemap should also filter.
4. Create dynamic labels (and tooltip) for the treemap that display based on the level of detail shown (category/sub-category/product name)